An uncommon English piracy of the great Scull and Heap map of the environs of Philadelphia, from The Gentleman’s Magazine for August 1753.

The map is focused on Philadelphia and the course of the Delaware River. Philadelphia is shown in outline only, highlighting the original grid plan, mapped out by Thomas Holme, with the “Court House” the only feature named. The map extends approximately seven miles into Pennsylvania from Philadelphia: from Germantown in the north to Hog Island, in the Delaware in the south, and from Derby in the west to the Delaware.

The map is significant for the wealth of detail on property ownership and economic activity in the hinterland, detailing meeting houses, inns, mills (fulling-mills, saw-mills and at least one snuff-mill), and ferries.

One difference between the American original and this magazine derivative is the Philadelphia version had an architectural profile of the new Court House building engraved along the upper border. To suit the smaller format, the profile was engraved onto a second plate and issued as a separate plate in The Gentleman’s Magazine.

This map was published in the Magazine to accompany two brief descriptions of the city of Philadelphia proper (“A Comparative View of Philadelphia, Boston and New-York; in a Letter to a Friend” and “Philadelphia described”), but there is no direct correlation between map and text.

Scull & Heap
Nicolas Scull (1686/7-1761) was a member of the Scull family of surveyors and mapmakers active in Pennsylvania; he served as Deputy Surveyor for Philadelphia and Bucks Counties until, on June 14, 1744 he was appointed Surveyor-General for Pennsylvania, a post he held until his death. He is celebrated for three published maps: “Philadelphia and Parts adjacent” (1752), the “Map of the Improved Part of the Province of Pennsylvania” (1759) and “This Plan of the Improved Part of the City [of Philadelphia]” (1762), published posthumously by his heir and daughter Mary Biddle.

George Heap (1714-1752) was Scull’s deputy, as an Assistant Surveyor-General for Pennsylvania, but also an accomplished artist and draughtsman. Under Scull’s direction, Heap drew an “East Prospect of the City of Philadelphia”, a huge panorama of the city on four sheets. He completed it in August 1752 and arranged to travel to London to oversee publication. Unfortunately, he died suddenly December 23, 1752 during the passage, and it was left to others to ensure publication. While the four-sheet version is an impressive work of art, its size – proposed to be “seven feet four inches in length” – made it impracticable, so John Penn commissioned a two-sheet version, to ensure wider distribution. Nonetheless the images have been described as the “most distinguished of all prints of Philadelphia … [and they] present the first engraved likenesses showing the city’s appearance” (Wainwright).

Scull and Heap’s “Philadelphia and Parts adjacent” map and Heap’s “East Prospect” were both heavily pirated over the next twenty years, the former a staple of English, French and German publishers during the Revolutionary War.

References
David Jolly, Maps of America in Periodicals before 1800, #45. Martin P. Snyder, City of Independence, #16. Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Scull and Heap’s East Prospect of Philadelphia”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography vol. 73, no. 1, pp. 16-25. Nicholas B. Wainwright, “Scull and Heap’s Map of Philadelphia”, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography vol. 81, no. 1, pp. 69-75.